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The BP oil leak is an unmitigated disaster, not just for the crude reasons now covering the Gulf of Mexico and coastal communities. An Obama administration, already ideologically averse to fossil fuels, leveraged the opportunity to declare a moratorium on all deep water drilling while “studying” safety procedures.

On the surface there is nothing wrong with being prudent in averting a future disaster, and there are no two ways in characterizing the blowout other than that. A disaster. The press, Gulf Coast politicians, and all sorts of people from fishermen to the tourist industry, want some action, any action, and damages paid.

Of course, there are always the ubiquitous environmentalists for whom even one part per million of oil anywhere is unacceptable. This flies in the face of natural seeps which, the world over, are many times the volume of any man-made leaks. As with this year’s tragedy and others before it, damages are exaggerated by those that hate oil, no matter what the past experience has shown for the long term effects.

Playing with the Gulf’s oil supply is no playing matter because of another, far more important, lurking danger. In 2001, Ron Oligney and I published a graph showing unambiguously that for the prior 35 years all negative job growth periods correlated directly to oil supply disruptions.

When the U.S. economy is healthy, it generates almost 4 million jobs per year. The longest sustained jobs growth in recent history was during the Bill Clinton era and before that during the second Ronald Reagan term and part of the George H.W. Bush presidency.

Starting with the first Arab Israeli war in 1967 and then the 1973 Arab oil embargo, the Iranian Revolution in 1978, combined with the Iran Iraq War that ended in the early 1980s, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and the natural gas shortage in 2000 (in terms of oil equivalent) all those events, each causing an oil supply disruption greater than 2 million barrels per day, were followed shortly thereafter by a recession and a negative jobs growth. Jobs lost were never regained. The trends of interrupted job growth show that clearly.

One can also argue that the oil price that went to almost $150 per barrel in July 2008, created a phantom shortage that precipitated the brutal jobs contraction since then.

Here is the stark reality. Total U.S. offshore oil production is 1.7 million barrels per day, almost all of it from the Gulf of Mexico, eerily close to the two million barrels per day of the historic correlation.

The Obama Administration is in a conundrum. Surely somebody there must be aware that shutting down offshore drilling -- a space-age, technologically demanding exercise -- for an extended period of time cannot be restarted by just a wave of hand. Operators and contractors will move on internationally. Coming back in a hostile business environment will be slow and painful, if ever, and the type of reservoirs under deep water, while enormously prolific, decline very fast. The effect of drilling stoppage will be felt a lot quicker than people think.

Of course, ideologues often do not want to be bothered with facts, and Washington is not short on those.

Some may think what a great opportunity the drilling moratorium may bring to move on to the post-oil era. The president himself on March 6 talked about replacing the “energy resources of the last century” with something else. These promises are nebulous, unclear on what those new sources are, other than the thoroughly discredited without massive government subsidies corn-based ethanol. No matter what one’s position is on alternatives and the long-term viability or desirability of fossil fuels, any transition will take decades, not related to the immediate effects of oil supply disruption from a moratorium on U.S. offshore drilling.